PHYTEUMA. 



line. The flower-head is large and flat and dull, en-saucered by an 

 ample involucre, and the uninteresting thing is rare in the Alps of 

 Styria and Carinthia. 



Ph. humile now asks our notice, the noble species of the cliffs 

 being settled. Ph. humile is wholly distinct and never to be mis- 

 taken, being a spoiled version of H. hemisphaericum. It is larger, 

 leafier, with broader, stiffer, and much longer, duller foliage, often hairy 

 and faintly toothed at the edge ; the flower-stems are a trifle taller, and 

 though the blossoms are larger, yet the enveloping bracts (which are 

 usually sharply toothed) are so much larger still that the flower-head 

 can never overflow and form into a ball of blue, but must always sit 

 more or less flat in the saucer of the involucre. Altogether it has 

 a coarse tone which is no reproach that can ever be brought against 

 either of its successors, whatever their other faults ; and the leaves 

 contribute to that effect, with their narrow length suggesting an 

 Erysimum's. And now come the tourist's twin problems. 



Ph. pauciflorum and Ph. hemisphaericum are the two most general 

 Alpine species, and the two most generally confused, though in 

 themselves readily distinct. Let it be pictured then, that the foliage 

 of Ph. hemisphaericum is thin and narrow and pointed, just like a glossy 

 little grass, with well-furnished tufts of leaves, arching and graceful, 

 about an inch or two in length and forming wide mats. Thus runs 

 the neat plant about in the highest fine turf, especially in the non- 

 calcareous ranges, and in later summer sends up a number of stems 

 2 or 3 inches tall, set with a leaf or two, and ending in a cup of bracts 

 or leaves pointed and finely -hairy, that give issue to a very great number 

 of tiny, clear-blue, soda-water-bottle flowers arranged in a crowded and 

 almost globular head, with the forked stigma (as in all these) pro- 

 truding far, and waving about in a most vivacious manner, like the 

 tongues of many imprisoned snakelings, making the orb of clear- blue 

 blossom look quite fluffy and living. 



Ph. pauciflorum is wholly different, though this also runs about as 

 freely, and forms the same wide stretches in the highest ridges of the 

 non-calcareous ranges. But here the leaves are much fewer, much 

 stiffer, darker, fatter, shorter, not at all grass-like or wavy or pointed, 

 but solid and firm and blunt, and so far from being finely narrow, 

 that they are almost of a squeezed oblong outline. The bloom-stems, 

 again, are rather shorter and rather stouter, ending in a cup of much 

 more rounded bracts, from which overflows a head of only quite a few 

 blossoms — some eight or six perhaps — but these very much larger and 

 more ample and swollen ; not pale-blue, but of a gorgeous dark-blue 

 violet, especially at the tips, most delicately paling downwards to 



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